To each their own

Today we’ll take a break from the Nana updates (she’s still progressing very well).

At the end of last year, we knew it was getting to be time for the kids to have their own rooms.  Since it made more sense for A to share a bathroom with Nana, that meant she moved out and J remained in their current room.

We wanted the kids to apply their personalities to their own rooms. Since we wanted to paint her room before she moved in, we worked on A’s room first.  There was no doubt what color it would be.

A painting her new room color.

Yes, it is pretty much Pepto-pink

K painted on some flowers

A added a flower or two of her own.

She also picked out the comforter and trundle bed (to accommodate all the sleep-overs she’s planning).

Add a couple of giant leaves for effect.

And what girl’s bedroom is complete without an updated closet organizer?

As for J, about 4 years ago, I posted about a Star Wars bed that somebody had made for their son.  My line in that post was “Please, oh please, let one of my kids love Star Wars so much that I can build something like this.”  Well, turns out J takes after his old man regarding Star Wars.  So when it was time to repaint his room, I started planning.

When we found out we were expecting boy-girl twins, we knew the nursery had to have a fairly gender-neutral color palate.  Since K was on bed-rest most of the pregnancy, it was up to me to paint.  Being the engineering geek that I am, I came up with a scheme to paint individual panels on each wall, with shades of pink, green, blue and yellow alternating in the panels.

The old panel color scheme.

Since J still thought these panels were cool, when it came time to re-paint, we didn’t want to deviate from this pattern.  After re-painting each panel a blue J picked out, I started to plan.  I worked with J to pick out some Star Wars images and quotes.  I created a mock up of each panel on the computer so he could see what it would look like when finished. Then the real fun began.

I took each computer graphic and projected it using a small projector attached to my laptop.

After getting the image projected just right, I then painted in (by hand) the dark areas. Each image probably took a hour or so to paint.

After all 8 images were painted, I starting thinking about the best way to do the quotes on the wall.  Since hand painting the lettering would be much less forgiving than the pictures, I decided to use adhesive vinyl lettering, cut using one of those computerized craft cutting systems called the Silhouette Cameo.  This is a very cool machine that allows you to cut out just about any shape that you can create on a computer.

Create the text on the laptop

Let the Silhouette do its magic

Peel off the excess vinyl

Apply to the wall

One down, seven more to go.

After all was said and done, here are the eight panels.  Click on each to see it bigger.

I can’t really tell you how much time I invested in getting his room to this point.  Let’s just say he’d better not start liking The Lord of the Rings any time soon.

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